On the product front, Musk has rushed projects that have caused chaos on the platform. That was one of the driving factors, researchers told the New York Times, behind a rise in hate speech on the platform, including an over 200 percent increase in anti-Black slurs from when Musk took over until December 2022 - upsetting many users who already struggled with harassment on the platform. The platform’s basic product design is now tailored to the whims of Musk, a leader who seems to prioritize his own image and “free speech absolutist” ideology above business interests.ĭo you work at Twitter and have thoughts about what’s going on at the company? Get in touch with Shirin Ghaffary confidentially at Signal number available upon request.Ī few examples: Musk, in the free-speech spirit of letting people say almost anything they want on Twitter, restored the accounts of thousands of previously suspended users, including neo-Nazi and QAnon accounts. The episode demonstrates how Twitter has become less and less dependable. Musk seemed to acknowledge the phenomenon, posting a meme showing a woman labeled “Elon’s tweets” force-feeding a bottle of milk to another woman labeled “Twitter,” and later posting that Twitter was making “adjustments” to its algorithm. Soon after the change, many users started noticing their feeds had been bombarded with Musk’s tweets. Musk’s cousin, James Musk - who is now a full-time employee and a reported “fixer type” within the company - reportedly sent an urgent 2 am message asking all capable engineers to help, and the company tasked 80 engineers to manually tweak Twitter’s underlying system to promote Musk’s tweets. Musk, apparently livid because his tweets about the Super Bowl were getting fewer views than President Joe Biden’s, flew to Twitter’s headquarters and ordered engineers to change the algorithm underlying Twitter’s main product to boost his own tweets above everyone else’s so that they show at the top of Twitter users’ “For You” page. Musk’s Super Bowl meltdown, as reported by Platformer, is one of the clearest signs so far of Twitter’s decline.

Musk’s erratic decisions are degrading the integrity of Twitter’s core product and alienating wide swaths of users. While Twitter, like other social media networks, has always had periodic outages, under Musk, the app’s unpredictability isn’t just limited to technical issues. It’s not the first time: Last month, users around the world couldn’t post tweets, send messages, or follow new accounts for several hours. (Twitter has acknowledged the error, posting on a company account that “parts of Twitter are not working as expected” due to “an internal change that had some unintended consequences,” and that it’s trying to fix the problem.) Twitter’s social media dashboard application that’s popular with super users, Tweetdeck, also appeared to be down. In the four months since Elon Musk took over the company, the app has experienced major glitches - such as when, on Monday, all links to external websites stopped working. If you were accustomed to a time when Twitter - while far from perfect - was a place where you could dependably digest a wide range of breaking news, politics, celebrity gossip, or personal musings, it’s time to accept a new reality.

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